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“Weapons free, I repeat, weapons free. All but squad weapons use single fire. Make your shots count, boys — I don’t think we brought enough bullets.”

He clicked off, then leaned out past the front fender, just enough for the barrel of his M4 to aim down the street.

Three black hatchlings rushed toward him, running through the pools of fire rather than around them. Flames clung to their black pyramid bodies, curled around their tentacle-legs.

So fast … I’ve never seen anything that fast …

Paulius pulled the trigger twice, pop-pop; the middle hatchling went down hard. Another one dropped, either from a Ranger’s bullet or from one of his overwatch men up on the fifth floor. The creature’s forward momentum rolled it awkwardly beneath a burning car.

The third hatchling closed to within five meters.

Don’t fire till you see the blacks of their eyes flashed through Paulius’s mind right before he dropped it with another two-bullet burst.

The thunder of the Apaches’ rotors echoed through the city canyons. The tone suddenly became more raw, more real as the first helicopter came around a building into plain sight, just behind the oncoming wave of attackers. Paulius heard the sharp snare-drum sound of M230 chain guns opening up.

A Molotov landed ten feet to his left, forcing him away from the front fender. He scrambled to the rear fender, looked around it. Through the flickering flames and the s.h.i.+mmering air he saw the enemy rus.h.i.+ng forward.

Hundreds of hatchlings, and behind them, an endless wave of people.

As fast as he could, Paulius yanked grenades from his webbing and threw them at the oncoming mob.

STREETS OF FIRE

Frank Sokolovsky wondered if there could be anywhere colder than where he stood. Besides the roof of the John Hanc.o.c.k Building, sixty stories up, in the dead of night, with a Chicago winter wind whipping in at twenty miles an hour? That was some cold s.h.i.+t right there.

He had worked his way through college on the GI Bill. He’d served most of one tour in Afghanistan before an IED blew his left foot clean off. Frank had considered himself lucky — not only had he lived, he’d been given a medical discharge and gone home to Hyde Park, to his job as a s.h.i.+pping manager, to his wife, Carol, and their daughter, Sh.e.l.ly.